New Highs, New Risks.

• Author: VILBIG, PETER
• Position: Drug abuse among young people

A NEW GENERATION OF DRUGS PROMISES A SAFE HIGH. DO THEY DELIVER? OR ARE TEENS GAMBLING WITH THEIR LIVES TO GET LOADED?

Samantha Reid left her room a mess that night. Clothes were tossed haphazardly over her bed in the quest for the perfect outfit. Magazines lay strewn among piles of stuffed animals. Telling her mom that she was going to a movie, the 15-year-old freshman at Carlson High School in suburban Detroit met up instead with two girlfriends. After a pit stop at a 7-11 for a Slurpee, they drifted to their real destination: an apartment in nearby Grosse Isle where four young men, two of them seniors, were waiting to hang out and watch videos.

The guys had their own plans to spice up the party. Unknown to Samantha and her friends, they had laced a few bottles of Mountain Dew with GHB, a feel-good chemical touted on the Internet as a safe, nonaddictive high that makes you feel drunk. What the Web sites don't say is that a slightly larger than normal dose can lead to coma and even death. Samantha drank hers down, and a few minutes later fell asleep on the couch. By the time the other partygoers brought her to an emergency room four hours later, she was already brain-dead. The next night she officially became one of the 65 GHB-related deaths since 1990.

Samantha's two friends were luckier. One recovered from a coma the next day. The other had turned down the spiked drink. As for the guys, three of them were found guilty of manslaughter this spring and were sentenced to 15 years in prison. The fourth will spend up to five years in jail on lesser charges.

"None of the girls ever knew the substance was put in their drinks," says Grosse Ile police detective John Szczepaniak, who investigated the case. "Samantha never knew what happened to her."

GHB--otherwise known as Liquid X, Scoop, or Grievous Bodily Harm--is one of the substances that teens nave recently begun to abuse with increasing frequency. Like teens of earlier generations, many teenagers today smoke pot, drop acid, or snort cocaine despite the known risks. But those drugs have been joined by others whose dangers are less well known: GHB, MDMA (also called ecstasy), and a potpourri of prescription pills. "What these kids don't know about these drugs is killing them," says Dr. Henry Kranzler, a psychiatrist at the University of Connecticut Health Center.

In recent years, illegal drug use by teens seemed to be coming under control. An annual survey conducted by the University of Michigan shows that teen drug use overall had soared by nearly 50 percent from 1991 to 1997, before dropping off in 1998 and holding steady last year. But a sudden 55 percent spike in teen ecstasy use in 1999, coupled with recent seizures of large caches of the drug, has raised fears that a new wave of teen drug abuse may be on the way.

ALCOHOL IS STILL KING

Despite this sharp increase, only 8 percent of 12th-graders have tried ecstasy, the study found, making it far less popular than alcohol or marijuana. By the 12th grade...